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Monday, March 16, 2009

Pomegranate Iced Tea

I love iced tea. It's not unusual for us to have a big, gallon pitcher of home-made sweet tea in our fridge. Or, to see me drinking a huge, ice filled glass of this favorite beverage through a bendy straw (I'm a kid at heart).

Today, instead of grabbing my usual glass of sweet iced tea, I poured only about 6 oz. of tea in the glass, and then added about 4 oz. of POM Wonderful pomegranate juice! The result was a beautifully crimson glass of deliciously tart, and thirst quenching pomegranate tea!

Because of my love of tea, I've tried many iced varieties, including peach, raspberry and even a lemonade iced tea! Of those, this would compare best with the lemonade iced tea because of the bright, crisp flavor the pomegranate juice adds to the tea. I absolutely love it, and can see myself drinking it on many a hot summer's day, while reading on the back patio in the future.

Diana from POM Wonderful provided me with a little packet of health information with the case of juice. To be completely honest, I was expecting to browse through it saying "yeah, yeah.." because we all know fruit is healthy, but I was actually impressed by a lot of the facts and statistics! Who would have known?!

PLEASE NOTE: The following information has been found to be deceiving. These claims were made and advertised without proper scientific support. For more information, please see this post.

Some impressive health facts to consider:

-After only three months of drinking POM juice, patients with coronary heart disease had a 17% increase of blood flow to the heart.
-Patients with advanced atherosclerosis who drank only 8 oz. of POM juice a day for one year had a 30% decrease in arterial plaque.
-Patients with recurring prostate cancer drank 8 oz. POM juice daily for two years and their PSA doubling time went from 15 to 54 months. This is really important because PSA is a protein created by your prostate, and prostate cancer can increase these numbers.
-POM juice has more and better antioxidants than red wine, grape juice, Acai juice, and green tea! (I found this interesting because we're hearing lately how great Acai juice is, and POM has double the antioxidants!)

Not only is the health information surprising, but I feel like the POM company's information is equally as impressive! I was surprised to learn that they are the only brand that guarantees it contains 100% authentic pomegranate juice. There are no additives, sweeteners, or colors. In fact, when I received my box, it had ice packs in it and said to refrigerate after receiving, because there are no preservatives! They control every step of the juice and fruits from tree to press, and even to the bottles that they manufacture! You don't realize any of this in the grocery store, but once seeing this information, I really feel like this is a company that cares. I never knew any of this about them!

I also did some research on my own and found a UCLA study conducted last year, that found the top 10 healthiest fruit juices, based on antioxidants. Pomegranate juice came out on top, and it was reported: "Pomegranate is the healthiest of them all because it contains the most of every type of antioxidant. It wins in all categories. And it's thought that it might do some very good things; it may protect against some cancers, such as prostate cancer. It might also modify heart disease risk factors, and it could be healthy for your heart. So pomegranate was the clear winner."

4 comments:

That looks so good! I'm really a bit obsessed with pomegranate seeds, but I haven't experimented much with the juices. I do enjoy a splash mixed with some Pellegrino, and I'm sure that I'd love it in iced tea too. I'm a big iced tea fan as well. It is the "house wine of the south", after all. :-)

careful not to jump on the antioxident trend. if something is a fruit or veg it's likely to have antioxidents in it. plus most americans dont even know what that means anyways, they just see it and buy it. MARKETING TREND/SCAM. 7-up with antioxidents? really? its just to sell it. it's real easy to mislead average americans with food labels.

pom iced tea is definitely one of the top drinks you could make with that product though.

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